VOTE Oleg Kreymer for OCLC Global Council

Why not?

My principles:

OCLC develpments: on behalf of and for the member libraries

WorldCat as a universal repository for human knowledge resources and cultural objects

Cloud Computing

Web-Scale applications

Libraries rule the Web!

“So, What’s Wrong With It?”

After years of dealing with IT -related inquires of all shapes and sizes, I think I can finally point out my favorite question coming from an average, innocent user.

“So, What’s Wrong With It?” is an absolute delight.  On top of being ridiculously rhetorical, it still contains a hopeful, but illusive possibility that some sort of explanation exists or can be found.

But, in the end, such possibility remains an illusion.  The only way to answer is this:

“Don’t you see? IT DOESN’T WORK. THAT’S WHAT’S WRONG WITH IT!”

Libraries as a Non-Competitive Environment

Libraries don’t have any natural predators.  Our challenges come from the environment.

In business terms: Libraries don’t compete with one another or with other cultural institutions.  They are, however, affected by social, financial, political realities, which are largely outside of their control.

As a result of such non-competitive environment, libraries’ survival skills are  very poor.

Technology is Designed to Fail

A Definition of Technology: Technology is Designed to Fail.

When we implement any new technology, we are sure of two things:

1. It will break at some point, and
2. When it works, it will not work as expected.

In fact, we expect these two things to happen.  We purchase our technology with a service plan, we ask for a warranty, we have user support networks and professionally staffed helpdesks.

This is a NORM.  And this principle of build-in failure is most apparent in the Information Technology, simply because we all use IT tools, without necessarily understanding how and why they were designed this particular way.

my FOAF entry

Oleg Kreymer

Simplicity & Elegance

Technology (technological solutions) must be Simple & Elegant.

If it isn’t, it’s not even worth considering.

Bluehost cPanel Screen of Death



What was on my mind in the year …

2004 – XML

2005 – Metadata

2006 – Web 2.0

2007 – Open Source

2008 – CSS

2009 – Cloud Computing

2010 –  Semantic Web

Natural Language Processing & Semantic Web

The more structured Web pages become — the more sense and place NLP has in interpreting them.

Is it a paradox?  Perhaps.

Let’s try again: The less “natural” texts are more easily processable for concepts that can be extracted from them.

ta-da!

Strategic Vision for Library Systems

It’s time to work on a Strategic Vision for Library Systems.

Why Strategic Vision?  Because plans never work out, especially the best laid ones.
Why Strategic?  Because one has to look ahead to get anywhere.

The coolest thing, though, is that Strategic Vision seems very popular in military circles.  Means I’m on the right track!